Le sens-sans-signe: Pour une éthique de la création

Benoît Maire, Anne-Françoise Schmid

Abstract

The meaning-without-sign: For an ethics of creation

The following article is the result of a collaboration between a painter and a woman philosopher. They worked previously on an experimental documentary film about objects and art objects, which was realized at Palais de Tokyo. The painter had illustrated in black and white fictions of philosophy, written during a festival on lost films organized by UNdocumenta in South Korea, and then he made photographs of oil paintings of the English translation. This article about painting and philosophical ethics is their first common text. It aims to show that there is no interdiscipline or passage known between the philosophical work and the painting. The philosopher can not imitate the recognition of the painter nor the painter to repair the philosophical non-encounter. The question then is: What can ethics in this non-symmetrical space? Rather than being a product of philosophy, it is what organizes this space between recognition and non-encounter. It is an ethics for philosophy, rather than the other way around. Ethics force to greet the other philosophers without the grudge of the loss necessary to the invention and allows the painter to know the distances that make him feel the recognition. This ethical space is unknown and can not be covered by the artist's philosophy of access or pre-nomination by indexes. Ethics is this unknown, i.e. it is a sense-without-sign, it is without rules-said but process of indexation and acceptance of the loss.